Can this be recycled?

Boulder City was "green" before it was cool.

It has been known as "Clean, Green Boulder City" among its residents for a while now. Read the websites of the local city government or chamber of commerce and the slogan is there somewhere, in its full glory, or portions of it dropped into the text like tiny sighs - a "clean" here, a "green" there.

The motto, however, has always been more about the parks and mature trees that dot the tiny hamlet, not necessarily about its commitment to any environmental cause. But that has changed.

Just weeks ago the city instituted a single-stream recycling program so that residents simply fill one giant, green bin with everything from milk cartons to magazines and roll it out to the curb. The city embraced the program not only as a matter of conscience but also, it hopes, to take some strain off its landfill.

The city of North Las Vegas is doing the same thing as part of a single-stream pilot program run by its waste-removal contractor, Republic Services.

Not only has there been a big jump in recycling volume in North Las Vegas because of the convenience of single-stream recycling, as opposed to sorting everything into separate bins, but Henderson will be adopting the single-stream concept next year, Republic Services Area President Joe Burkel said.

"I do feel like more and more residents are expecting, I don't know if it's fair to use the word 'demand,' but they're wanting that single-stream service, so I would think over time the other entities will move in that direction and we're ready to support it whenever they're ready to do it," Burkel said.

Future growth in the volume of recycled materials could translate into more jobs in local recycling. Nationally, the recycling and reuse industry has made an impact, accounting for more than
1 million jobs with an annual payroll of nearly $37 billion, according to the U.S. Recycling Economic Information Study, commissioned by the Environmental Protection Agency and several states.

"As a driver of economic activity, the recycling industry compares favorably to other key industries, such as automobile manufacturing and mining," the report states. "Especially significant is the finding that recycling far outpaces the waste management industry because recycling adds value to materials, contributing to a growing labor force."

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Careers in Recycling report released in September 2011, Americans generated about 243 million tons of municipal solid waste in 2009, or about 4.3 pounds per person every day.

Although the recession has caused a slight drop in the total amount of generated waste, interest in recycling continues to grow, which means a continued need for workers such as drivers, sorters, mechanics and technicians, the report said. Local recycling companies agree there is definitely potential for growth, including job creation, although they admit it has taken some time to gain a foothold in Southern Nevada.

Len Christopher was 23 back in 1997 when he first started working for a new Las Vegas company called Evergreen Recycling, which processed discarded construction materials such as wood, cardboard and metals. In the beginning he was the company's sole truck driver, picking up materials from various sites, drop boxes and Dumpsters. He also operated heavy equipment and sorted materials.

"I did everything," he said.

Even with the vast amount of waste material that was being created in the midst of a construction and population boom, recycling was an anomaly back then, making Christopher feel a bit like the Lone Ranger.

"When we started recycling in '97 it was, you know, I always joke but I felt like I was in the wild, wild West. It wasn't popular, it wasn't the thing to do, if you will," he said.

But that changed. Evergreen's client base grew and it provided waste management services to hundreds of development projects. By the time the company was acquired by Republic Services in 2010, it had received numerous awards from organizations such as the EPA and the Construction Materials Recycling Association, and Christopher had gone from a jack-of-all-trades at a fledgling recycling enterprise to the company's CEO.

Now, in his job at Republic Services, he oversees about 200 employees and is responsible for about 150,000 tons of recycling material a year, he said.

"I enjoy what I do and I think it's interesting watching the markets grow and develop. The technology that there is now as far as processing equipment, you know (compared with) what it was 15 years ago, has obviously changed and developed. It allows us to process more material more efficiently," he said.

"You may have had a single-stream system that handled 10, 15 tons an hour, well now they're developing facilities that can go anywhere from 50 to 70 tons an hour. So technology has really grown."

Another major player contributing to the growth is SA Recycling, which has been in Southern Nevada since 2008. The company specializes in recycling and processing ferrous and nonferrous metals, and has about 50 facilities around the Southwestern United States, including five in Las Vegas.

The company takes in everything from insulated wires to the big stuff: demolition scrap, manufacturing scrap, appliances and old cars. On average, the company shreds about 200 to 350 cars a day in Las Vegas and takes in about 14,000 tons of ferrous materials such as steel every month, said Brandon Smith, SA Recycling regional general manager.

This translates into a staff of about 130 employees who handle everything from weighing the materials that are coming in and directing traffic, to operating heavy equipment such as excavators, loaders and brooms. There are also maintenance crews, sales representatives, welders, electricians and truck drivers who may travel as far as California or northern Arizona to collect scrap materials.

When they hire, they look not only for motivated employees but also for a commitment to safety. Every worker goes through a four-hour safety orientation when they are hired and are issued equipment such as hard hats, gloves and safety vests, Smith noted.

"If it cannot be done safely, we don't do it, it doesn't happen," Smith said.

The company provides training for its specific jobs, with skilled workers such as truck drivers and electricians expected to be certified and experienced before they are hired. Also, there are definitely opportunities to move up in the company or change specialties, Smith added.

"I'm looking out the window now and I saw one of my excavators drive by. The operator is a young man who came in 1999 to get a welding job and he's now one of my best operators," Smith said. "He went from a welder, to a forklift operator, to a loader operator, to an excavator operator and he operates it like his own hand, it's just amazing. And we've trained him on the job and he's learned that and he's stepped up to a good position."

Republic Services collects recyclables at residences and business locations that include casinos, manufacturing facilities and construction sites. The company takes in materials such as cardboard, office paper, newspaper, junk mail, plastic containers, glass bottles, aluminum cans and steel containers, Burkel noted.

The items are processed at two recycling facilities and workers include sorters who separate the nonrecyclable materials from the recyclables by hand, truck drivers, mechanics, supervisors and managers.

There are also workers who maintain the high-tech sorting equipment that is getting more and more complex as the industry evolves, Burkel added.

Also, within its job of collecting and processing recyclables, Republic has launched green projects of its own which has meant some very specific employee retraining.

The company, for example, is converting its trucks from diesel fuel to natural gas, which has meant retraining drivers and mechanics, Burkel said. Just within the past year it also has turned its Apex Regional Landfill into a gas-to-energy facility.

The methane gas produced by the landfill waste is collected through a giant system of pipes and wells, then treated and cleaned. The gas is then used to produce about 8.5 megawatts of power to provide electricity to homes in the Las Vegas Valley, Burkel said. That has created jobs for three Republic employees who operate the treatment plant while the power plant is operated by about four employees from a partner company.

"It's a pretty high-tech plant. There's lots of electronics and chemistry involved in treating that, so it's those types of technical skills that folks were trained for to do that," Burkel said.

Like SA Recycling, Republic Services emphasizes safety above all else with its workers, a necessity in dealing with tons of materials and giant, sometimes quite complicated, pieces of equipment.

The second piece of the puzzle is "delivering the best customer service we possibly can. The rest of the skills we can teach ya, but those two basic attitudes are something we certainly look for in any new employee," Burkel said.

Christopher, who has seen the industry change firsthand, believes that recycling, since it is a relatively new industry and evolving all the time, can be a great place to learn skills and is bound to have opportunities for those who are motivated. One of his recent employees who started out as a temporary worker, he noted, is now a supervisor at a Republic facility in St. Louis.

"There's not a lot of folks out there that have experience in this industry so it's a great place, especially now with so many people out of work, it's a great place to get started and those people with potential have the opportunities to grow," he said.

And then there are those who are leading the charge.

Zachary Delbex, the founder and CEO of the nonprofit Repurpose America, was a forklift operator working the conventions when he saw how tons of materials were being wasted once the events were over. He originally started Repurpose America in a garage with the idea that he could find ways to reuse what are often unrecyclable materials.

His company's projects have included turning banners into badge holders, giving artists' groups materials to create exhibits and making playground canopies out of repurposed signs.

He believes Las Vegas can lead the way with this kind of recycling because of the amount of materials created by the conventions alone. And it's simply the right thing to do.

"If we throw the best parties we need to clean up best after them," he said. "Utilizing our waste as a feed stock for manufacturing gives us an opportunity to create jobs but also it gives ourselves the chance to work ourselves out of a problem. We need jobs but we also need to be more sustainable in our practices."